iterability

Interviewer: ...would you expand on how iterability does its rhetorical work?"

Butler: As an example, consider the word queer, which thirty years ago (even, twenty, even fifteen years ago) was considered profoundly derogatory and frightening as a speech act. I remember living in great fear of the word, knowing that I was eligible for it, thinking that once it actually landed on me I would be branded forever and that the stigma would do me in completely.

(interview with Judith Butler in S. Salih, 2004, p. 351)